Saturday, December 21, 2013

You Think Too Much

This first appeared as one of my few facebook notes. I'm copying it here; perhaps it's a better place for it.

This is what the phrase "You're overthinking it" is like.

Mary
and Bob sit down to a game of chess. Mary is an inexperienced player,
and Bob is giving her some advice. He's being nice, trying to hint at
the right moves without telling her what to do. So, Bob is making his
moves very quickly, since he's experienced, and Mary is not difficult to
play against (and he's going easy on her anyway). Mary is very
uncertain of most of her moves, and spends a lot of time staring at the
board indecisively.

At one point, Mary is looking at
the board in confusion. Bob sees very plainly what move she needs to
make; she should move her rook to defend her knight. Mary is looking
very carefully at all the possible moves she could make, trying hard to
evaluate which things might be good or bad for her, trying to think a
few moves ahead.

"You're thinking too much," Bob says. "It's very simple."

This
advice sounds helpful to Bob. From Bob's perspective, Mary is spending a
lot of time thinking about many alternatives when she should be quickly
hitting on the critical move. And it's true: if Mary were a better
player, she would be thinking less here.

From Mary's
perspective, this is not very helpful at all. She tries to take Bob's
advice. She tries to think less about her move. She figures, if Bob says
"It's simple", this must mean that she doesn't need to look several
moves ahead to see the consequences. She looks for possible moves again,
this time looking for things that have good consequences for her
immediately.

Mary moves the pawn up to threaten one of Bob's pieces.

Bob takes Mary's knight.

Bob
explains to a frustrated Mary what she could have done to avoid this.
"See? You're overthinking it" he adds. To Bob, this feels like the right
explanation for Mary's wrong move: she was thinking about all these
other pieces, when she needed to be defending her knight.

The
worst part is, Mary starts to be convinced, too. She admits that she
was taking a lot of time to look several moves ahead in all kinds of
situations that turned out to be irrelevant to what she needed to do.
She tries to think less during the rest of the game, and makes many
other mistakes as a result.